Photo Credit: The Rest Is History
Conan O’Brien is enlisted to be the “Denny Lane” to podcast co-host Tom Holland’s “Paul McCartney” in a trailer for The Rest Is History‘s upcoming special on the Beatles.
Announced on Friday — not coincidentally, as the revamped The Beatles Anthology series unspools on Disney+ — The Rest Is History‘s two-part special promises a close look at a rock band that was “a complete break from everything that came before,” as Fab Four superfan O’Brien puts it in the press release.
“They were singer-songwriters who wrote their own music, and in so many ways they broke the mold,” O’Brien posits. “Most groups at the time had a clear frontman — Dion and the Belmonts, for example — and there was real pressure on them to follow that model. For a moment they were even ‘Johnny and the Moondogs.’ But they always knew they were a group.”
“The Beatles single-handedly brought us from black-and-white to color,” O’Brien remarks in the trailer below, which samples “Come Together” and its funky riffs. “The volume of work they have is incredible… They remain as relevant today as they were in 1964.”
Holland, an English novelist who usually co-hosts The Rest Is History with historian Dominic Sandbrook, opines that the Beatles are “historically significant because they act as lightning rods for everything that made the 1960s such a revolutionary decade.
“In many ways, we in the 21st century are still living in the aftermath of the ’60s — just as people in the 16th century lived in the wake of the 1520s,” he adds. “The cultural and ethical transformation is on that scale, and the Beatles were not only symbols of it, but active drivers of it.”
Late-night TV vet O’Brien currently hosts the HBO Max travel show Conan O’Brien Must Go, which with its coming season is heading to India after a years-long wait on a filming permit.
Watch a trailer for The Rest Is History – Beatles Special, which debuts Wednesday, December 3 on YouTube and podcast platforms:
